Scotland’s Blade Runner summer: dark skies and apocalyptic rain

Share via

All we need is Harrison Ford and we’d know for sure we were trapped on the set of Blade Runner. Life in the West of Scotland this summer has fulfilled the film’s apocalyptic vision of climate change: incessant rain teeming from permanently darkened daytime skies.

Where I live, near Loch Lomond, there has been only one occasion since the beginning of July when there were three full consecutive dry days. In Skye, rain has fallen for 50 days, the longest uninterrupted spell of wet weather since 1861. In Dumfries and Galloway, they have had the wettest August since records began